Search results matching tags 't-sql tuesday' and 'sqlpass'http://sqlblog.com/search/SearchResults.aspx?o=DateDescending&tag=t-sql+tuesday,sqlpass&orTags=0Search results matching tags 't-sql tuesday' and 'sqlpass'en-USCommunityServer 2.1 SP2 (Build: 61129.1)Learning through othershttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2014/11/11/learning-through-others.aspxTue, 11 Nov 2014 06:01:45 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:56394rob_farley<p>This PASS Summit was a different experience for me – I wasn’t speaking. I’ve presented at three of the five PASS Summits I’ve been to, where the previous one I’d not spoken at was 2012, while I was a PASS Director (and had been told I shouldn’t submit talks – advice that I’d ignored in 2013). I have to admit that I really missed presenting, both in 2012 and this year, and I will need to improve my session abstracts to make sure I get selected in future years.</p> <p>I’m not a very good ‘session attendee’ on the whole – it’s not my preferred style of learning – but I still wanted to go, because of the learning involved. Sometimes I will learn a lot from the various things that are mentioned in the few sessions I go to, but more significantly, I learn a lot from discussions with other people. I hear what they are doing with technology, and that encourages me to explore those technologies further. It’s not quite at the point of learning by osmosis simply by being in the presence of people who know stuff, but by developing relationships with people, and hearing them speak about the things they’re doing, I definitely learn a lot.</p> <p>Of course, I don’t get to know people for the sake of learning. I get to know people because I like getting to know people. But of course, one of the things I have in common with these people is SQL, and conversations often come around to that. And I know that I learn a lot from those conversations. I don’t have the luxury of living near many (any?) of my friends in the data community, and spending time with them in person definitely helps me.<a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/t-sql-tuesday-60-something-new-learned/" target="_blank"><img title="TSQL2sDay150x150" style="border-top:0px;border-right:0px;background-image:none;border-bottom:0px;float:right;padding-top:0px;padding-left:0px;margin:5px;border-left:0px;display:inline;padding-right:0px;" border="0" alt="TSQL2sDay150x150" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/TSQL2sDay150x150_4550D970.jpg" width="154" align="right" height="154" /></a></p> <p>And it’s not just SQL stuff that I learn. <a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/t-sql-tuesday-60-something-new-learned/" target="_blank">This month’s T-SQL Tuesday</a> (for which this is a post) is hosted by <a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Chris Yates</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/yatessql" target="_blank">@YatesSQL</a>), who I got to run alongside on one of the mornings. Even that was a learning experience for me, as we chatted about all kinds of things, and I listened to my feet hitting the ground – another technique I learned from a community – and made sure I stuck to my running form to minimise the pain I’d be feeling later in the day. Talking to Chris while I ran helped immensely, and I was far less sore than I thought I might be.</p> <p>On the SQL side, I got to learn about how excited people are about scale-out, with technologies like Stretched Tables coming very soon. As someone involved in the Parallel Data Warehouse space (and seriously – how thrilled was I to be able to chat with Dr Rimma Nehme, who was involved in the PDW Query Optimizer), scale-out is very much in my thoughts, and seeing what Microsoft is doing in this space is great – but learning what other people in the community are thinking about it is even more significant for me.</p> <p><a href="http://twitter.com/rob_farley" target="_blank">@rob_farley</a>&#160;</p> <p>PS: This is the 60th T-SQL Tuesday. Huge thanks to <a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic" target="_blank">Adam Machanic</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/adammachanic" target="_blank">@adammachanic</a>) for starting this, and giving me something to write about each month these last five years.</p>SQL Community – stronger than everhttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2012/11/13/sql-community-stronger-than-ever.aspxTue, 13 Nov 2012 10:43:08 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:46126rob_farley<p>I posted a few hours ago about a <a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2012/11/13/summit-reflections.aspx" target="_blank">reflection of the Summit</a>, but I wanted to write another one for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by <a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/t-sql-tuesday-36-sql-community-what-does-the-community-mean-to-you/" target="_blank">Chris Yates</a>.</p> <p><a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/t-sql-tuesday-36-sql-community-what-does-the-community-mean-to-you/" target="_blank"><img style="background-image:none;border-bottom:0px;border-left:0px;margin:5px;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;display:inline;float:right;border-top:0px;border-right:0px;padding-top:0px;" title="TSQL2sDay150x150" border="0" alt="TSQL2sDay150x150" align="right" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/TSQL2sDay150x150_4EFE9042.jpg" width="170" height="170" /></a></p> <p>In January of this year, Adam Jorgensen and I joked around in a video that was used for the SQL Server 2012 launch. We were asked about SQLFamily, and we said how we were like brothers – how we could drive each other crazy (the look he gave me as I patted his stomach was priceless), but that we’d still look out for each other, just like in a real family.</p> <p>And this is really true.</p> <p>Last week at the PASS Summit, there was a lot going on. I was busy as always, as were many others. People told me their good news, their awful news, and some whinged to me about other people who were driving them crazy. But throughout this, people in the SQL Server community genuinely want the best for each other. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I don’t see much of this.</p> <p>Australians aren’t big on cheering for each other. Neither are the English. I think we see it as an American thing. It could be easy for me to consider that the SQL Community that I see at the PASS Summit is mainly there because it’s a primarily American organisation. But when you speak to people like sponsors, or people involved in several types of communities, you quickly hear that it’s not just about that – that PASS has something special. It goes beyond cheering, it’s a strong desire to see each other succeed.</p> <p>I see MVPs feel disappointed for those people who don’t get awarded. I see Summit speakers concerned for those who missed out on the chance to speak. I see chapter leaders excited about the opportunity to help other chapters. And throughout, I see a gentleness and love for people that you rarely see outside the church (and sadly, many churches don’t have it either).</p> <p><a href="http://chrisyatessql.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/t-sql-tuesday-36-sql-community-what-does-the-community-mean-to-you/" target="_blank">Chris points out</a> that the M-W dictionary defined community as “a unified body of individuals”, and I feel like this is true of the SQL Server community. It goes deeper though. It’s not just unity – and we’re most definitely different to each other – it’s more than that. We all want to see each other grow. We all want to pull ourselves up, to serve each other, and to grow PASS into something more than it is today.</p> <p>In that <a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2012/11/13/summit-reflections.aspx" target="_blank">other post of mine</a> I wrote a bit about Paul White’s experience at his first Summit. His missus wrote to me on Facebook saying that she welled up over it. But that emotion was nothing about what I wrote – it was about the reaction that the SQL Community had had to Paul. Be proud of it, my SQL brothers and sisters, and never lose it.</p>Collation errors in businesshttp://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2010/12/13/collation-errors-in-business.aspxMon, 13 Dec 2010 23:59:21 GMT21093a07-8b3d-42db-8cbf-3350fcbf5496:31584rob_farley<p>At the <a href="http://www.sqlpass.org/summit/na2010/default.aspx" target="_blank">PASS Summit</a> last month, I did a set (Lightning Talk) about collation, and in particular, the difference between the “English” spoken by people from the US, Australia and the UK.<a href="http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/steve_jones/archive/2010/12/07/t_2D00_sql-tuesday-_2300_13-_2D00_-what-the-business-says-is-not-what-the-business-wants.aspx" target="_blank"><img style="background-image:none;border-bottom:0px;border-left:0px;margin:5px;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;display:inline;float:right;border-top:0px;border-right:0px;padding-top:0px;" title="TSQL2sDay150x150" border="0" alt="T-SQL Tuesday" align="right" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/TSQL2sDay150x150_21DC5B54.jpg" width="154" height="154" /></a></p> <p>One of the examples I gave was that in the US drivers might stop for gas, whereas in Australia, they just open the window a little. This is what’s known as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian">paraprosdokian</a>, where you suddenly realise you misunderstood the first part of the sentence, based on what was said in the second. My current favourite is Emo Phillip’s line “I like to play chess with old men in the park, but it can be hard to find thirty-two of them.”</p> <p>Essentially, this a collation error, one that good comedians can get mileage from.</p> <p>Unfortunately, collation is at its worst when we have a computer comparing two things in different collations. They might look the same, and sound the same, but if one of the things is in SQL English, and the other one is in Windows English, the poor database server (with no sense of humour) will get suspicious of developers (who all have senses of humour, obviously), and declare a collation error, worried that it might not realise some nuance of the language.</p> <p>One example is the common scenario of a case-sensitive collation and a case-insensitive one. One may think that “Rob” and “rob” are the same, but the other might not. Clearly one of them is my name, and the other is a verb which means to steal (people called “Nick” have the same problem, of course), but I have no idea whether “Rob” and “rob” should be considered the same or not – it depends on the collation.</p> <p>I told a lie before – collation isn’t at its worst in the computer world, because the computer has the sense to complain about the collation issue.</p> <p>People don’t.</p> <p>People will say something, with their own understanding of what they mean. Other people will listen, and apply their own collation to it. I remember when someone was asking me about a situation which had annoyed me. They asked if I was ‘pissed’, and I said yes. I meant that I was annoyed, but they were asking if I’d been drinking. It took a moment for us to realise the misunderstanding.</p> <p>In business, the problem is escalated. A business user may explain something in a particular way, using terminology that they understand, but using words that mean something else to a technical person. </p> <p>I remember a situation with a checkbox on a form (back in VB6 days from memory). It was used to indicate that something was approved, and indicated whether a particular database field should store True or False – nothing more. However, the client understood it to mean that an entire workflow system would be implemented, with different users have permission to approve items and more. The project manager I’d just taken over from clearly hadn’t appreciated that, and I faced a situation of explaining the misunderstanding to the client. Lots of fun...</p> <p>Collation errors aren’t just a database setting that you can ignore. You need to remember that Americans speak a different type of English to Aussies and Poms, and techies speak a different language to their clients.</p>